Conservative Families Whose Kids Fight Our Wars Have A Lot More On The Line This Election
For Americans, the start of 2024 signals the coming election and brings to mind questions of which candidate best represents their values and who can bring back a semblance of sanity to our country. Red-state families, however, should also consider military service and the present foreign policy issues.
2023 brought on a continuation of the first major European war since WWII and saw multiple hot spots around the world ignite into potentially regional conflicts heading into the new year. Closer to home, all three U.S. servicemembers who died in the Iran-backed drone attack over the weekend were residents of the battleground state of Georgia.
Republican voters in particular should consider that based on a report for 2020, almost 48 percent of enlisted recruits across the Department of Defense, excluding the Coast Guard, were from states that voted Republican in 2020. When adding on the purple states of Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada, the number jumps to about 56 percent. Prior polling and conventional wisdom have borne this out time and again.
In other words, red-state families are likely to bear the lion’s share of the burden and tragedy of combat casualties, should the U.S. intervene in another conflict around the globe. Statistically, it would be conservative families who would have to stare down at flag-draped coffins. Conservative mothers would be weeping for their fallen children after they defended some far-off land in the name of some U.S. national security interest. Why should conservatives continue to man the military with the best of our young people when the very people who decide to make war have continually spat in the face of conservative values?
Since the Biden administration took over in 2021, Americans’ freedom has been limited concerning their careers, health care, and religion. We witnessed fellow countrymen calling for those who disagreed with Covid mandates not to have equal access to medical care or employment. Biden himself is the one who remarked that the Second Amendment is useless because you’d need an “F-15,” not just a “gun” to go up against the government.
This administration, along with its handpicked Joint Chiefs of Staff, has repeatedly commented on its racial preferences, fear of white supremacy, fear of white rage, and the need for “diversity.” Furthermore, their disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan left equipment there worth over $7 billion. This made those weapons and equipment freely available to the Taliban, due to the supposed logistical cost of transporting the equipment back. Even worse was the administration’s extraction effort of Afghan allies and fellow American contractors who fought and went on combat missions with our sons and daughters.
Thousands of Afghans who did fight for their country were left behind, and private nongovernment organizations had to extract many of our allies and countrymen who were contractors. And let us not forget the carnage of the final days, when 13 members of our military lost their lives due to a suicide bomber.
It’s worth asking whether conservatives’ loyalty to military service should continue — especially when so many traditional conservative values are openly mocked, dismissed, and ridiculed by the authorities training and deploying our children.
Reflexively, an America First individual might think that not supporting the military is unpatriotic. However, one can support the individuals serving our country and pray for their safe return while recognizing that this government does not deserve a single person they recruit into the military, particularly when we consider their many failed wars and policies.
It is our duty — to ourselves, our families, and this nation — to understand what we believe is worth dying for, especially since it is historically most likely that our children will be the ones fighting and dying when we become involved in another war. We must watch, read, and try to grasp the current geopolitical landscape. We must establish our lines in the sand proactively so that we don’t again fall prey to more government lies. It’s important to remember the falsehoods used to start wars such as “WMDs” in Iraq or the “Gulf of Tonkin Incident” that resulted in the loss of American lives.
Republicans should be pondering if a war against Russia over Ukraine is worth Americans leaving their families, or if a war against China over Taiwan is worth never seeing our children again. Because military recruits have historically come from conservative states, we need to understand foreign policy now more than ever, as it will be our families helping to fight these wars. To persevere into the future, it is imperative that parents, especially America First parents, learn, listen, and understand in their own ways the conflicts that America could find itself in.
For the 2024 election, let us closely examine candidates and their historical and current stances on foreign policy and what it will mean for the lives of us and our children. The contrasts couldn’t be starker.
Garrett Hayes is a former U.S. Air Force officer who served four years on active duty and one deployment to Kandahar, Afghanistan. He has a Bachelor of Science in Physical Education and a Master of Art in Physical Education. He enjoys the outdoors, spending time with family, and coaching sports in his childhood hometown.
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